Containment and territorial transnational
actors: Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas
AMNON ARAN
*
International Aairs 88: 4 (2012) 835–855
©
2012 The Author(s). International Aairs © 2012 The Royal Institute of International Aairs. Published by Blackwell Publishin
g
Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Containment is the term generally used to characterize American policy towards
the USSR after the Second World War, when it consisted of a series of attempts
to deal with the power and position won by the USSR in order to reshape postwar
international order.
1
Containment, as originally articulated by its chief architect,
George F. Kennan, was always contested, for example because it did not clarify
whether Soviet behaviour had strictly national or ideological roots, and would
result in the USSR’s having the initiative about where and when to act.
2
Nonethe-
less, throughout the Cold War it remained US policy, partly because of the failure
in 1953–4 of the alternative, ‘liberation’ and ‘rollback’.
3
Although containment
changed and sometimes seemed to have broken down, for example in the Vietnam
War, the imprint of Kennan’s ideas—perhaps more than anyone else’s—endured.
4
After 1989 it seemed that containment had no place in the peaceful multilateral
environment which seemed to be emerging; however, it proved adaptable to a
range of post-Cold War situations, including some which appear to have little
in common with the context and goals of containment’s original formulation:
among these are the challenges posed to US national security by the so-called
rogue states.
The endurance of containment suggests that it possesses what Gaddis terms
transferability: the capacity of a grand strategy from the past to transcend the
circumstances that produced it to suggest what should be emulated and what
avoided in future policy.
5
Drawing on Gaddis’s claim and the methodology of
structured, focused comparison between ‘deviant’ heuristic case-studies, which
allow the testing of theory beyond traditional boundaries,
6
this article uses
Israel’s foreign policy towards Hezbollah and Hamas to demonstrate a hitherto
*
The author would like to thank Anastasia Nesvatilova, Christopher Coker, Gemma Collantes-Celador, Justin
Rosenberg and Shani Orgad for their help with this article. The responsibility for any errors, of course,
remains his own.
1
George L. Gaddis, Strategies of containment: a critical appraisal of American national security policy during the Cold War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 4.
2
See e.g. Walter Lippman, The Cold War: a study in US foreign policy (New York: Harper, 1947).
3
Christopher Coker, Reflections on US foreign policy since 1945 (London: Pinter, 1989), p. 64.
4
Henry Kissinger, White House years (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979), p. 135; Gaddis, Strategies of
containment, p. 25.
5
Gaddis, Strategies of containment, p. 380.
6
Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennet, Case studies and theory development in the social sciences (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 67–93.
